It is classified, tentatively, as a ring barrow, one of five such earthworks clustered within a surprisingly small field measuring roughly 59 metres northeast to southwest and 110 metres north to south. That cluster is precisely what makes the place interesting, and also what makes archaeologists cautious about it.

Ring barrows are among the more modest expressions of Bronze Age funerary practice, low circular banks or platforms, often with an enclosing ditch, marking the burial place of the dead. They are found across Ireland, though they can be difficult to distinguish, without excavation, from later agricultural or domestic features. At Knockloe, the doubt is substantial. The landowner recorded that the field was used for ringing horses in the nineteenth century, a practice of exercising horses in a circle, which would leave its own circular marks on the ground. One of the earthworks in the northern part of the field, visible as a cropmark on aerial photography from 2005, appears on closer inspection to be the impression left by a circular feeding trough rather than any ancient monument. The tight grouping of all five features within one narrow field, their relatively good state of preservation, and their proximity to the now-abandoned Knockloe House have together led to questions about whether these are genuinely prehistoric remains at all, or whether the landscape around a nineteenth-century country house has simply produced a convincing set of lookalikes. Aerial photography, both a 2005 Ordnance Survey Ireland image and a Digital Globe photograph from November 2011, has been the primary means of examining the site, and the evidence it offers cuts both ways.